Steps in Giving Up My Unhappy Story About You
1. Return to the Present – There are no problems in this moment. It’s only the regrets

of the past and the angst about the future that is capable of generating misery. The ego abducts us into the land of time; the realm of unconsciousness, by occupying us with thoughts of past and future. Neither of these places exist – except in the mind. Core beliefs live in the mind as well – they are deceivers that can not survive in the NOW.

2. Use Your Negative Reactions as Messengers – Focus your attention on the places you get hooked in your current life situation and use the negative emotions that arise, to connect you to the unresolved wounds from childhood. Remember, whenever you have a negative reaction, it is always about the unresolved emotional charge that you are carrying from your past. See the triggering person or situation as a messenger who is reflecting an old pattern or core belief within you. Your negative reaction tells you that there is personal unresolved emotion that you are being given the chance to make conscious for release. This is the ultimate route to freedom.

3. Conscious Observation – The famous Sufi, Rumi, said, “Don’t go back to sleep!” Staying conscious is the first and most important tool for liberation from our core belief stories. It is not how long we stay conscious, but how often we ‘come-to’ about our stories that matters. Every time we wake up in the middle of an old pattern, without judging ourselves for being there, we have won another round. That’s all that we need to do… see it! As Jung said, “Anything we can make conscious, we can transform.” It is the key to freedom. It is not our job to awaken our loved ones, however. That is their task.

4. Shifting My Perception – Changing the way you see something can make all the difference. It won’t change the event but it can affect how you view the event and what it means to you, which changes everything. For example, rather than considering yourself “unimportant” because your parents didn’t have a lot of time to spend with you, you can simply shift the way you are seeing the situation. This completely alters the way you feel about both the situation and yourself.

5. Physical Alignment/Daily Practice – Letting go of resistance to what is, as Eckhart Tollé suggests, is the key to peace. Your core belief story can only exist as long as you believe it or resist it with negative reactions! when you fight for or against it, it fights back. When you stop persisting or resisting it, the story has no choice but to fall away. Then the authentic self is revealed. Acceptance comes with surrender. Letting go of resistance includes accepting others in this moment, just as they are. Do it, and watch how full of love and abundance life becomes.

6. Practice Gratitude – Appreciation follows on the heels of acceptance. When we accept what is, we automatically raise our level of gratitude. We learn to see what a powerful antidote to fear and all forms of negativity gratitude is. Our limiting core story is abolished when heartfelt appreciation is felt and expressed. In A Course in Miracles, it is said that love and fear can not abide in the same space. Core Beliefs are anchored in fear whereas gratitude is born of love and serves as the great antidote to all negativity. Because whatever we focus on expands, insisting on a grateful state of mind, allows us to bring more abundance and goodness into our personal relationships.

7. Forgiveness – By definition, forgiveness means to “let go” (for-go) of our unhappy story about the other. We do this more for ourselves, than for those who have been hurtful to us. Ask yourself who you are helping (or hurting) by refusing to forgive. It also helps to remember that what we judge in others as unforgivable is, inevitably, mirroring something inside of us that is asking to be forgiven. Self forgiveness is the ultimate goal.

I went down into the darkness for two whole days recently. It was a VERY dark time emotionally … I felt angry and hopelessly exhausted with no end in sight. I had spiraled into old familiar territory, into the “I’m never going to realize the rewards of my hard efforts” story that has been with me a very long time. It had been years since I went that low … although now as I think about it, I can remember how, in my previous life, I’d lived mostly in that same abysmal story. Actually, I never knew there was a choice!

That I could CHOOSE a more positive way of seeing my life other than as the hopeless, “never-gonna-mount-to- nuthin,” perspective? Impossible!

I never thought to question this assessment of myself; I blindly accepted it as being the truth about who I am. And in that way, this trip to hell was different from the onset … because this time I DID know I had a choice. I chose with consciousness. And I chose NOT to use the “good” tools I know, and that I teach, to lighten the inner darkness. I don’t know why exactly. But in retrospect I can see the tremendous value in having made that choice.

I consciously CHOSE to sit in the depths of my inner darkness where I ranted and railed against Reality. I gathered evidence against those I blamed for my pain, including the Universe and God. I felt sorry for myself, I cried and whimpered like a scared child, And my mental rant was externalized in my interactions with those closest to me when I pushed them away, and accused them (my poor spouse 🙁 ) of not caring. I knew where I was. I knew that I was playing the Helpless Baby Victim who nobody cared enough about to rescue. I was on the Victim Triangle in full force.

I got to watch the whole thing from front row, ringside, with the inner witnessing eye of my Observer, who in spite of the drama going on, stood still, unruffled, and simply watched, with awe and stunned amazement, mostly. I watched myself REFUSE to use the tools I know so well and have perfected through assiduous practice. I couldn’t MAKE myself do the Work. I had no energy for THAT! I used all my energy in resistance instead.

I finally fell into bed the second night, still angry, and pleaded for rescue … demanded it really. And then I awoke suddenly, in the wee hours, from a dream. I had been “conversing” with the “Powers-that-Be” in my dream … and had been handed a “note” written in the air, (as in, “the writing is on the wall … ;)) When I received the words I could read them clearly … but within moments of awakening, the words were gone. Nevertheless, I retained the gist of it.

Basically the note said … “You belong to Me. Your life is in my hands. You will be on Planet Earth as long as I choose to keep you here, and I will bring you Home when I am ready, when I have decided that you are finished. Until that moment, and not a minute before, you are under My care … You can resist this simple truth, call it unfair, etc. and suffer, as you’ve been doing – or you can accept the simple truth of it, and relax. It’s up to you … Your reaction to this Truth will not alter it in the least.”

I felt immediately relieved, if a bit chastised – like a small child whose parents had just told her that she could fight against the rules or cooperate, that her feelings about the rules would not change the Reality of them one little bit … I had just been similarly “set straight” about Reality from the Highest Parent – and BOY, did I ever need the set to!

That next morning I got out of bed ready to pick up my box of mental and spiritual tools! I went back in and questioned my beliefs, using the Four Questions that Byron Katie outlined for us in the Work, along with the Guiding Principles of Reality – as steps up and out of the darkness and began to climb back up out of the hole I’d dug for myself.

I’ve noticed that when my unhappy story rules, no matter how true it may seem, I suffer horribly. And I’ve experienced the difference when Reality rules my thinking; my seeing is better and inner peace prevails.

I’ve also come to realize that occasional trips down into my inner hell are sometimes the only way to uncover and correct the faulty wiring of old, outdated belief circuitry that needs to be rewired to better plug into Reality and the present moment. When seen in this light, I understand that even my darkest moments are necessary in my walk towards greater Light.

So I find less need to blame myself (and others) for these occasionally necessary detours away from Reality, and choose to see these difficult passages as “inner roads in need of repair” instead. Cuz really, how does one know repair is needed unless one travels down that road? 😉

We CAN begin to ease up on ourselves on this consciousness journey – there’s no race, no first prize for perfection! We’re all here, bumbling along, moving in and out of the darkness, only because it’s the best, perhaps only, way to learn the life lessons essential for our personal growth.

But I also wanna say … PHEW! It sure does feel better to be up here in daylight again, back in the sunshine of NOW… and I like to think that the darkest recesses of my inner self are not quite as dark as they were before my most recent visit there.

Blessings,

PS. Remind me to talk to you some more sometime about the importance of going into the dark places where our story holds us prisoner with the guiding principles, that, like cell block keys in hand, unlock the mind and set it free – if it’s of interest to you. 🙂

The mind rules the body. Through my work, I have come to see just how true those words are. What we believe determines not only our health, but the physical stance and posture we assume, and that physicality becomes the way we communicate to others about who we are and what we believe. Our body is a transmitter of the energy we create through the thoughts we believe.

Each of us has adopted a bevy of thoughts with a central, most often limiting, belief that rules; these are our core beliefs. Core beliefs generally originate in childhood. Often they come from a thought lineage that has been passed down to us from previous generations and that consists of both positive and negative beliefs. However, when I use the term, core belief, I am referring to the limiting or negative core beliefs since they are the ones that cause us trouble.

Core Beliefs act like a magnet by attracting into their orbit other complementary thoughts/beliefs, and creating a belief energy field that becomes our identity. This limited identity often establishes what we call victim consciousness. In other words, we adopt core beliefs that define and shape an often painfully limiting victim consciousness, an energetic pattern of consciousness, or identity, that we then become totally addicted to – even though it may be a sorely dysfunctional and painful one.

We ‘wear’ these patterns in our body. They are carried energetically in the body and are visible through our physical habits and posture; these patterns form what we call our victim posture or stance that, though we may attempt to compensate for it, or hide it, it nonetheless transmits a ‘victim vibe’ that attracts to us people and situations that vibrate at the same low frequency. In other words, through our victim posture we invariably attract to us the people and situations that verify for us what ever victim belief we have adopted and are carrying physically.

Our body reflects our beliefs, and because this is so, we can use the body as a doorway to identify our negative, limiting core beliefs, and to clear them. How? By identifying the places in the body where the victim pattern has us out of physical right alignment and using those places of contraction and chronic discomfort to identify the belief that we are carrying there. Through observer consciousness (the antidote for victim consciousness) we investigate the painful beliefs we are carrying in our body and begin to bring ourselves back into a healthier alignment. Years of chronic pain disappears as we begin to release the troubling thought patterns that have been holding our bodies in contorted, painful misalignment and return to an alignment that restores health on all levels, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually

Through years of researching these ideas in my experiential work with clients (and on myself) I have verified them and continue to discover better ways of moving us out of our victim patterns and into alignment with our Universal Source which, when we are in alignment with it, heals and restores our health and sanity.

I do understand the importance of “feeling our feelings” in the process of emotional healing. I DO value the part of the process that recognizes and releases emotion; feelings are energetic impulses that act like messengers whose job is to report to us the state of our current vibrational frequency, and to show us the unhappy thoughts we are believing!

I worked in addictions/co-dependency treatment for years where we facilitated anger/shame/grief work with our clients, and I was well-schooled in the popular idea that only by releasing childhood suppressed emotional material can we move past our emotional stuck-ness.

That said, however, I have come to question the widely-held assumption that drumming up an emotional response helps us unload accrued emotional pain. I have not found that doing this sort of emotional venting actually eliminates, or dissipates the emotional energy being regurgitated. Instead I’ve seen that the more we drum up feeling, the more feeling we generate for release. This was confusing to me. If the feelings are old, stored up emotion in need of release, then why, in the releasing process, do we seem to generate even MORE of it?

Such inner seeking and questioning allowed me to develop a radically different way of understanding what the role of feelings is in the healing process; that shift in the way I see feelings served to transform the way I work with others. What I realized was that feelings come from thoughts, or from old imprinted belief patterns – only every time.

What we feel is determined by what we think and believe! This understanding prompted a huge turn around in me because I realized that, until and unless we begin to intervene at the level of what we believe, the grieving(shame/anger) NEVER ends. Initiating feeling work without addressing the beliefs behind those feelings will not bring true clearing. It cannot, because we will just go on generating the negative emotional states we are trying to eliminate! We must question the beliefs and thoughts that produced the feelings in the first place if we want real relief!

It is in the amygdala, that tiny gland located in the temporal lobe of the brain, where thought impulses convert to emotion, which are then transmitted to the rest of the body, producing the physiological responses associated with the feelings generated there.

Please do not misunderstand. I do not mean to undermine the emotional body. It is very important. Our feelings DO play a critical role, and therefore need to be experienced. But what happens when we understand the true relationship between thoughts and feelings is that we work differently with those feelings.

Once we understand that our thoughts, not our life circumstances, cause our pain, we stop feeling at the mercy of life, of other peoples behavior, and of our own feelings! We come to see that the only thing that can possibly victimize us is our own thinking.

Understanding that our beliefs are what causes our feelings allows us to use our feelings as the messengers they are meant to be. Feelings alert us that we are thinking painful thoughts. By questioning those thoughts our feelings can TRULY shift (we’re not talking about denial or stuffing feelings here, but genuine emotional shifts). Misery dissipates as we reframe our perception of a situation. This is what I have seen happen, over and again.

Of course, this is for you to discover for yourself. I recommend that you experiment with the concept that feelings come from our unhappy thoughts, rather than the old idea that feelings come from what happens “to us.” Try questioning your troubling thoughts about your life happenings, rather than blaming them as being the cause of your unhappy feelings.

Here are some helpful tips for grounding and furthering your progress towards peace:

1. Start your day with a deliberate focus on aligning with Source.
a. Read something inspirational to set the tone, and go, as if to a secret meeting w/ your beloved, to a private space set up somewhere in your home just for this purpose. Light a candle, play music that soothes and invites you to breathe and relax.

c. Set your conscious intention to connect w/ Source through your body energetically and use visualization to see the energy of Source surrounding you and flowing into your body, streaming along the meridians and energy pathways, reaching every organ, every cell in your body.

2. Sign up for some kind of gentle yoga (yin yoga. restorative yoga, vinyasa (flow), or basic Iyengar are all good places to start), or a qigong/tai chi/akido/reiki class to learn ways to work in, and with, the body energetically I cannot emphasize enough the body’s role in freeing us from victim consciousness. It facilitates powerful healing.

a. Is it true?
b. Do you know it absolutely?
c. Who are you when you believe that thought?
d. What would be different w/out that thought?

And use her Turn Arounds too, by taking the original thought that you are questioning and turn it around to its opposite and look for evidence to support that perspective.

5. Work with those four questions as you move through your day. They will help you tap into observer consciousness so that you are less reactive and resistant to life. Look for any little unhappy thought and practice turning it into its opposite to find a more peaceful way of seeing.

6. Learn and meditate on the basic guiding principles. Practice seeing the world through them. For instance, when you hear yourself thinking that something should, or shouldn’t, be the way it is, remind yourself of the principle that teaches us there are no mistakes; things are the way they are for a reason and that reason is for our benefit; focus on seeking that growth enhancing reason, rather than railing against the way things are. Observer consciousness is based on seeing life through universal guiding principles of life.

7. Pay attention to your feelings, especially to the ones that prompt you to react negatively, for they are like fingers pointing to the troublesome thought inside your mind, the real cause of your distress.

8. Suspect your way of seeing things anytime your perception of a situation generates unhappiness. Explore your mindset carefully and question the negative beliefs, one at a time, that surface in your mind – don’t quit until you’ve adjusted your way of seeing things to align with reality, recognizable by its high frequency. You know you have returned to reality when you feel grounded and centered, serene and connected – at peace. Reality is the here and now peace of this moment. Use this work to anchor you in reality.

I trust that any of the above mentioned suggestions you choose to follow will bring positive results – your pace and progress is a personal thing. Trust your rhythm.